One Piece is a unique experience in humanity. We are reading a modern epic. A vast, continuous story with thousands of characters, dialogues, choreographies, scenes, and more. But also a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Unlike a typical book, we can only read it one piece each time. It’s a serialization where, once a week, we get to experience a microcosm of its anthology. When Homer wrote *The Odyssey*, he didn’t spend 28 years publishing one stanza a week. Nor did Tolkien or Martin do the same with their fantasies, releasing one paragraph weekly. Manga works differently. And One Piece is the grandest of them all. It’s absolutely wild to spend decades knowing a character exists without knowing their name. Or to be 10 years old, waiting for a character to act, and now at 38, they still haven’t. This storytelling method means each new chapter can add countless new meanings to previous ones. Because of this, One Piece is the only work worth rereading in its entirety every week. Words like “smile,” “food,” “freedom,” “drum,” “white,” “void,” “heart,” “dance,” “sake,” “treasure,” “spirit,” “luck,” “curse,” “game,” “family,” “surname”—these have been in the story from the start, and only after decades have they begun to take on far greater significance in the narrative. There’s no point in drawing conclusions about anything in a story that’s still being told. We can try to guess the next word in this book, but it’s senseless to get frustrated over something not happening in a story that hasn’t ended. Enjoy it, my friends. All the hype we build for future arcs, for characters who haven’t acted, for mysteries still unrevealed—we won’t experience this on such a scale again. Some people are afraid to dive into all this, but One Piece is magical precisely because it grows with us as we grow with it. Happy Birthday, One Piece!

When the FUCK did it all go wrong?

One piece is older than me 5 days